Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[What the sect of the Continentes is.] From those already mentioned, many offshoots of many heresies have now sprung up, because many of them — indeed nearly all — wish to be teachers, and to depart from the heresy in which they had been; and, joining one dogma to another opinion, and then another to yet another, they insist on teaching something new, each recounting himself as the inventor of whatever view he has patched together — a practice he undoubtedly drew from the Antitheses of Marcion. To give an example: proceeding from Saturninus and Marcion, those called the Continentes (the Abstinent) proclaimed abstinence from marriage, thereby frustrating God's ancient creation and obliquely accusing him who made male and female for the generation of mankind; they likewise deny the salvation of him who was first formed. It is Tatian who has now introduced this blasphemy: he had been a hearer of Justin, but after the latter's martyrdom he fell away from the Church, and, puffed up and inflated by the presumption of being a teacher, as though superior to the rest, he established his own peculiar character of doctrine, telling of certain invisible Aeons like those of the followers of Valentinus, as if it were a fable, and declaring, like Marcion and Saturninus, that marriage is corruption and fornication, while on his own authority contradicting the salvation of Adam.
Others again, taking occasion from Basilides and Carpocrates, have introduced indiscriminate intercourse and many marriages, and carelessness about eating things offered to idols, saying that God does not much concern himself with such matters. And indeed, why should I say more? It is impossible to count all those who, by this route or that, have drifted away and abandoned the truth.